The Navy as a Fighting Machine eBook

Much has been written to prove that the sole reason
for the possession of the paramount navy by Great
Britain is that the soil of Great Britain cannot support
her people. In an essay, entitled “Naval
Power,” which I contributed to the United
States Naval Institute in 1911, the fallacy of
this was shown; and it was pointed out that even if
Great Britain grew more than enough to feed her people,
life could be made unendurable to the 60,000,000 living
there (or to the people in any civilized and isolated
country) by an effective blockading fleet. The
question of how great a navy any country needs depends,
not on the size, but on the policies of that country,
and on the navies of the countries that may oppose
those policies. The navy that a country needs
is a navy that can defend its policies, both offensively
and defensively. If, for instance, the United
States does not wish to enforce any policy that Great
Britain would oppose, or to oppose any policy that
Great Britain would enforce, then we may leave her
navy out of consideration. But if we decide that
we must maintain a certain policy which a certain
country may oppose, then we must have a navy at least
equal to hers; because we do not know whether we should
have to meet that navy near our coast, or near hers,
or far away from both. For the reason, furthermore,
that a war with a European Power might occur at a
period of strained relations with some Asiatic Power,
we must realize the temptation to that Asiatic Power
to seize the opportunity and attack us on the Pacific
side, knowing that we should need all our navy on the
Atlantic side. This seems to mean that in order
to have an effective naval defense (since we are precluded
by our policy from having European allies and no South
American country could give us any effective naval
help) we must have on each ocean a fleet as strong
as that of any nation on that ocean against whose wishes
we may have to enforce a policy—­or against
whose policy we may have to oppose resistance.

The essential requirement of any defense is that it
shall be adequate; because an inadequate defense will
be broken down, while the attack will retain a large
proportion of its original strength. In the United
States Naval Institute, in 1905, the present writer
showed, by means of a series of tables, how, when
two forces fight, the force which is originally the
more powerful will become gradually more powerful,
relatively to the weaker, as the fight goes on.
That, for instance, if two forces start with the relative
powers of 10 and 8, the weaker force will be reduced
so much more rapidly than the stronger that when it
has been reduced to zero the stronger force will have
a value of 5.69. The values mentioned indicated
the actual fighting strength—­strength made
up of all the factors—­material, physical,
and psychic—­that constituted it. Of
course, none of these factors can ever be accurately
compared; but nevertheless the tables seemed to prove
that in a contest between two forces whose total strengths
are as 10 and 8 one force will be reduced to zero,
while the other will be reduced not quite one-half.